PM chairs high-level meeting on Pathankot terror attack

Swaraj discusses Pakistan strategy with former foreign secretaries

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday night held a meeting with top officials to discuss the terror attack at the Pathankot Indian Air Force (IAF) base. National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar were part of the meeting held by Modi soon after returning from a two-day visit to Karnataka.

On Sunday, India lost an officer of the National Security Guard (NSG) in a grenade blast, taking the total casualties to seven. The IAF said it had shot down four infiltrators, but two more militants were feared to be holed up inside the IAF base.

"The area cannot be declared fully sanitised," Air Marshal Anil Khosla said at a news briefing in New Delhi on Sunday.

Home secretary Rajiv Mehrishi told reporters that four gunmen had been killed and the two militants who were still at large were expected to be 'neutralised' soon. Without recovering their bodies, they could not be confirmed dead.

Earlier in the day, a senior Army official had said, "A fresh contact has been established and there was brief firing." The Army has deployed five companies comprising nearly 500 personnel for the operation.

On Sunday, the Centre also discussed a strategy on Pakistan with former foreign secretaries and ex-envoys to Pakistan. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj held consultations, which were also attended by S K Lambah, G Parthasarathy, Shyam Saran, Shivshankar Menon, Satyabrata Paul, Sharad Sabharwal and T C A Raghavan. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), however, did not give details of this meeting.

Mehrishi said the capture of a car belonging to a superintendent of police of Punjab Police that was used by the militants alerted all security establishments in Pathankot, but there was no intelligence inputs about the precise target of the militants. Hence, the National Security Guard (NSG) could not be posted at the base in time.

Notably, this is at variance with the statements made by officials of the IAF who said they had information that an attack was imminent. Also, there seemed to be no clarity about the exact number of militants who were part of the team that mounted the attack. Although the home minister had said on Saturday that thermal imaging technology was being used to track the militants, there was no indication if all militants had been taken out and the operation was over.

Security experts agreed the presence of the grenade that killed Lt Col Niranjan Kumar of the NSG, while he was trying to defuse it, suggests a degree of training of the militants that could not have come from walk-up volunteers in an organisation such as the Jaish-e Mohammad. This has deepened suspicions that the attack was not the work of jihadi volunteers and the involvement of the Pakistani state could not be ruled out.

Sunday's events and the public outrage against Pakistan could put pressure on the government's resolve to continue talks. This was reflected in the fact that no official reaction was available from the Bharatiya Janata Party, which had on Saturday deputed one of its senior-most ministers to brief reporters.

The Prime Minister who was in Karnataka also made no statement on the subject. Minister of state in the MEA, V K Singh, said the PM and India were trying to strengthen Pakistan's civilian government led by Nawaz Sharif. But, as Pakistan was not a homogenous state, it was possible that one arm of the state - the Army and the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) - was working to undermine another.

That India had little credible information about the attack is gradually strengthening those who believe talks with Pakistan is a zero-sum game destined to end in betrayal by Islamabad.

The Pakistani media suggested the Pakistan Foreign Office was cautiously offering more consultation on terrorism - maybe lowering the level of dialogue on terrorism concerns to interior/home secretaries' level instead of the agreed NSAs' level.

But, India's next demand is likely to be that Pakistan conduct a probe into the circumstances of this attack and share a credible report with it. The foreign secretary level talks on January 15 are likely to be contingent on Pakistan agreeing to this.